Call Centre Reward and Recognition Program

Motivate your agents to perform with a Call Centre Reward and Recognition Program

One of the biggest challenges Call Centres face is continuously coming up with ways to motivate team members to hit their targets and KPIs every month.

There are plenty of different games and activities that are fun for a while, but don’t really motivate team members for long because they quickly become bored with them.

What you need is a long term Reward and Recognition Program that continuously keeps team members really interested in and eager to work hard to reach their targets and KPIs every month.

Recently I was consulting with a Financial Services company mentoring their Call Centre Manager and Team Leader to develop the tools they needed to get team members back to hitting their targets every week.

One of the areas we looked at was what they did to motivate team members to hit their daily, weekly and monthly goals.

What they had been doing forever was running a variety of different games for hitting certain targets like putting golf balls to win a prize or spinning a prize wheel and getting whatever lame prize was on the wheel like chocolates or something like that.

And, if you can believe it… they even had a note on the prize wheel that said prizes couldn’t be exchanged or substituted, and if you didn’t want the prize it was forfeited. I promise I’m not making this up!

Now, of course, your team is paid to do their job and expected to hit their targets and KPIs every month to keep their job, no question.

But as you know, call centre work is often really repetitive and, especially in sales-related activities, you can get more rejection in an hour than most face-to-face salespeople would experience in a day!

Because of this, you need to constantly keep the vibe in your call centre up and pumping, so team members are really driving to hit their targets and KPIs every day.

And, let’s face it, most team members are coming to work each day to earn the money they need to cover their bills and buy the things they really want.

Sure they want to hit their targets and KPIs, but that’s only to make sure they have a job next week, right?

If you really want them to work hard to hit their targets, you need to give them incentives that get their attention.

Things they really want that motivate them to work harder.

The key to this is giving them the opportunity to get those things they REALLY want by simply hitting or exceeding their targets and KPIs.

You can do this with a Reward and Recognition Program I created years ago when I was the Marketing General Manager for one of the largest hotelier groups in the world, and one of my responsibilities was overseeing our call centre operation.

How to create a Call Centre Reward and Recognition Program

Working with my Call Centre team we came up with a program we called “Telemarketing Dollars”.

Basically, we partnered with a major national electronic and white goods retailer and took their online catalogue, adding a variety of accommodation nights from all our hotels to create our own internal Reward Catalogue.

Our Reward Catalogue had literally hundreds of different items from CDs to big-screen TVs, refrigerators and dishwashers that our team could purchase through our Reward and Recognition Program.

Then we identified all the key performance areas and behaviours we wanted the team to strive for and set targets for each of them with a corresponding Telemarketing Dollar amount for achieving these targets or behaviours.

What really got everyone excited about this reward program was that they could accumulate as many Telemarketing Dollars as they wanted until they had accumulated enough dollars to use them for whatever they wanted to buy in the catalogue.

We’d also hold an auction at the end of the year and buy a whole range of things that our team told us they were interested in and they could use the Telemarketing Dollars they hadn’t traded in as yet to buy these items at the auction.

And, no we didn’t blow out our incentive budget every time; because what you do is determine what the currency value of a Telemarketing Dollars is in relation to real cash.

How you do that is by firstly listing all the things you want to recognize and reward. For instance, come up with daily rewards for things like whoever achieved a minimum of X or Y for the previous day gets some many Telemarketing Dollars.

This way everyone has a chance to get some Telemarketing Dollars, so they feel they have an equal opportunity to get rewarded.

But also include one reward for most X or Y achieved the previous day (over a minimum) to get your top performers involved in some friendly competition with other top performers.

You should also determine an amount of Telemarketing Dollars Team Leaders can use at their discretion to recognize certain behaviours you want team members to emulate through the course of a shift like how well a team member handled a particularly difficult customer, for instance.

Come up with the same categories for weekly and monthly rewards of Telemarketing Dollars, and, you should always include Most Improved for the week and month!

Just make sure you have definite criteria to determine each of the performance categories (especially Most Improved) so they are easily measurable and can be verified.

You don’t want the team thinking that receiving Telemarketing Dollars is just a popularity contest!

After you determined which production areas and behaviours you want to focus on and how many Telemarketing Dollars people get for each, add all the Telemarketing Dollars up and divide your monthly incentive budget by this total to determine the actual cash value of each Telemarketing Dollar.

Once you know the ‘Cash Value’ of a Telemarketing Dollar you can set a Telemarketing Dollar cost for each of your reward items.

And, make sure you don’t distribute any more Telemarketing Dollars than you can cover with your monthly budget, just like you would with real cash!

When we did this with my Financial Services client we came out with a ratio of 3 Telemarketing Dollars for each cash dollar.

Earlier when we set this up with my call centre team the ratio was closer to 1 in 10, considering we had much higher valued items that could be purchased.

When team members want to spend their Telemarketing Dollars for something they really want, simply have them give you the link to the specific item and have someone in the finance department buy it for them online, and have it delivered to the team member’s home address.